The Story of A Casual Tank in Azeroth

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When to NOT Need or Greed at all

When a player is used to solo play they don’t ever have to really make many decisions when it comes to what they pick up or not. As soon as you group with others, there is that annoying little box that has a dice, a gold coin and now a nice little disenchant icon. Then the player new to grouping asks, what do I do? The lazy response that I have heard before is, “need on everything you have a dice light up for.”

That is how a warrior ends up wearing spirit gear.

The LFR has tried to curve that a little making things a little more specific to classes. Basically if your class can wear it, you can roll for it. On top of that you now get a nifty little bonus for the job you are performing, tanking, healing or DPS.

I think this removes something out of the game in the name of convenience. That is basically how I first learned about what stats were good for me. Those rules are now second nature to me, but from time to time I encounter people that don’t know why an agility ring is not good for a plate tank even though it has dodge.

Gear and stats are intricate parts of the endgame, but they do affect play way before that. It is also why people now enter the dungeons or LFR with resilience gear. They look at the iLvL and some quite don’t understand why people look down upon them. I remember the term “welfare epics” used to describe PvP gear being used in a raid environment. Now we can all go to the AH and inflate our iLvL to circumvent the system. Most players new to end game don’t understand how much difference the sacrifice of dropping one stat for resilience really hurts.

So it is a numbers game!

Yeap, all over WoW we deal with numbers. DPS check, iLvl check, its all about the numbers! ROAR!

Warriors have it rough. While everyone jokes that everything is a hunter weapon, a warrior can equip pretty much anything in the game. It makes it very annoying to page through gear vendors and not have stuff shaded red because technically you can wear it.

But how do we as a community continue to pass down the knowledge to people that might have never visited MrRobot or Elitist Jerks?

We teach them when to need or greed depending on their spec. We teach them why a Greed is considered an OS roll. We pass down the knowledge that we either read, but in many cases was passed down to us.

The Need Roll – Main Spec

You roll need whenever an item drops that you can use on your main spec. To continue with the warrior team, if you are a protection warrior, you want Strength, Mastery, Dodge or Parry. For the most part if a plate piece has haste or crit in it will be a DPS piece. Hit and Expertise are different from tier to tier, but without a primary stat from the first list, it is probably not best for a tank. So if you have a slot in your gear where you are wearing a piece of gear of lower iLvL, you will roll need on that piece.

The nice thing to do in my opinion with tier pieces, is to only roll need if you don’t have them for your main spec. However we all know that most see their tier token and roll need. I think this is just being too greedy. Which brings us to our next roll

The Greed Roll – Off Spec

You roll greed on any piece of gear that you CAN use, but is not part of your primary spec. (Or spec that you are participating on the raid with) So our friendly warrior tank can then roll greed (or roll during an OS – Off Spec call out) on any plate item that has haste, crit on it. Some raid leaders are even nice enough to announce what the piece they are about to link is for (Tanking Plate – DPS Plate, etc).

What a warrior will never need is intellect or spirit. Whenever you see that pop up, you can either pass or click disenchant.

The important lesson here is that when you need on everything when that dice lights up you are truly cheating yourself on one of the coolest aspects of the game. You don’t get to click shift to compare the stats of the two pieces of gear to see what kind of difference it will make. I have always found that part of the fun playing WoW.

Stats are an important part of the game, and it is the reason why so many people get up and arms when someone does not enchant or gem their gear. Those +30 +40 to stats really make a huge difference. Being hit capped and stuff like that… but that boys and girls is a story for another day.